You may not give it much thought, but groundwater is an important Sweet Water resource. Groundwater reserves in Australia alone produce A$34 billion in annual revenue from mining, food production, and industrial.
It is, however, a vulnerable resource. Around 1.7 billion people live in areas where groundwater is stressed, with 60% of them in India and China.
Researchers from the United States and Canada recently calculated the total amount of groundwater on the planet and estimated that it is equivalent to a lake 180 metres deep covering the entire planet.
This makes sweet water the world’s largest active sweet water resource. Groundwater is often referred to as a “hidden resource” because it is rarely seen and difficult to access.
The same study team that calculated groundwater volume also analysed its age. How did they accomplish this? When we began testing atomic weapons, we introduced a handy time signature on Earth.
This leaves a time imprint on the water, rocks, and living beings. The researchers estimated that 6% of this groundwater is less than 50 years old by looking for radioactivity from atomic bomb testing in the groundwater.
If this water were dispersed evenly throughout the continents, there would be just three metres of “contemporary” groundwater scattered evenly over the continents.
It may be claimed that if we only utilise this modern groundwater, it is sustainable because we know it has been replaced.
Recent research has measured changes in landwater storage. Using GRACE satellite data from 2002 to 2014, the researchers measured changes in Earth’s gravity field.
Sweet water affects the gravitational field the most, followed by lake and river water. Changes in this water’s abundance affect the Earth’s gravity field. From 2002 to 2014, land-stored water rose.
Land-stored water increases global sea levels. Global sea levels are rising due to global warming, although the rate of rise has slowed in recent years due to more groundwater storage.
Gravity measurements can illustrate where groundwater storage has risen over time, such as the upper Missouri, Zambezi, and Niger basins in Africa. Rivers and rain are two of the main ways that fresh groundwater is replenished.
Gravity data revealed depleted land water. Groundwater is depleting in California and the Middle East. These data show where natural climate variability, human over-use, and global warming are affecting groundwater.
Our research group at the University of New South Wales has considered the implications of groundwater abstraction for the carbon budget.
We show in a new research published in Scientific Reports that the harder you pump groundwater, the more organic carbon rises to the top.
Pumping groundwater mobilises organic materials, which is generally found as films on the surface of rock cracks. Pumping groundwater can so transport organic carbon from a subterranean reservoir to a surface carbon source.
This could be discharged into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. We don’t know, but with over-use of groundwater in regions affecting about 1.7 billion people, we believe it’s worth looking into.
Our research is the first of its sort, and it has only taken into account a single experimental research location within a cracked rock aquifer.
This research will be expanded over the next three years by employing a series of bore fields that will be financed by the Australian National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
The goal of this research is to gain a deeper understanding of the sweet water organic carbon store.
Related CTN News:
NEW YORK — To save power, NASA turned off another scientific equipment on its long-running Voyager 2 spacecraft.
The space agency announced on Tuesday that 2’s plasma science instrument, meant to study the movement of charged atoms, was turned off in late September to allow the spacecraft to continue exploring for as long as possible, which is estimated to be into the 2030s.
NASA turned off a suite of instruments on Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, after exploring the gas giant planets in the 1980s. Both are currently in interstellar space or the region between stars. The plasma instrument on Voyager 1 stopped working years ago and was finally shut off in 2007.
The remaining four instruments on 2 will continue to collect data on magnetic fields and particles. Its mission is to investigate the regions of space beyond the sun’s protective sphere.
It launched in 1977, is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune. It is now more than 12 billion miles (19.31 billion kilometers) from Earth. 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) beyond Earth.
SOURCE | AP
MIAMI — Hurricane Kirk’s waves could generate life-threatening surf and rip current conditions this weekend throughout the United States East Coast, as well as in Bermuda, the Greater Antilles, and the Bahamas, according to forecasters.
Kirk was a Category 3 hurricane in the middle Atlantic Ocean that might grow further but was predicted to stay away from land, according to the Miami-based National Hurricane Center on Thursday.
Kirk-generated swells were forecast to reach parts of the Leeward Islands on Friday, Bermuda and the Greater Antilles on Saturday, and the East Coast and the Bahamas on Sunday, according to the center.
No coastal watches or warnings were in effect. The major storm was around 1,130 miles (1,820 kilometers) east of the Leeward Islands, with maximum sustained winds of 125 mph (205 km/h).
Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Leslie formed late Wednesday in the eastern Atlantic and is expected to strengthen into a hurricane in the following days, forecasters said. It was also not considered a threat to the land.
The storm was about 540 miles (870 kilometers) southwest of Cabo Verde’s southernmost tip, with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph (75 kph), according to the center.
The storms raged in the Atlantic as rescuers in the United States Southeast sought for missing persons after Hurricane Helene struck last week, leaving a trail of death and devastation.
SOURCE | AP
(CTN News) – A team of palaeontologists believes they have discovered fossilized footprints of one of China’s largest raptors. The collection of five fossilized dinosaur footprints is half the length of a school bus.
The footprints were discovered in a dinosaur trackway in south-east China in 2020. Scientists believe dinosaurs walked over the muddy river during the Cretaceous period, leaving footprints. Some footprints have been preserved for tens of millions of years.
The dinosaur trackway was unearthed in Longxiang and is around the size of a hockey rink. Some of the footprints are unusually formed, with intact imprints of only two toes.
Giant fossil footprints lead to megaraptor dinosaur discovery in China
Raptors, or predatory birds, are often small and referred to as deinonychosaurs. For example, a Velociraptor is around the size of a turkey. Few raptors, such as the Utahraptor and Dakotaraptor, increased in size significantly, reaching lengths of 5 to 6 metres. The Triassic ichthyosaur was the largest raptor known until now.
According to the scientists, the predator would have attacked its prey with a pair of huge “killing claws” on each foot.
What scientists discovered recently in China is massive, far larger than the largest superpredator known to date.
Scott Persons of the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and his colleagues, added another large raptor to the list. They named it Fujianipus, and they believe it lived in East Asia some 96 million years ago.
Scott Persons at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and his colleagues added another giant raptor to the list. They named it Fujianipus, and they say it lived in East Asia about 96 million years ago. Photograph:(Twitter)
Persons and his colleagues are currently working on areas of Fujianipus’ skeleton, therefore little is known. The investigators only discovered a few of its 36-centimetre-long imprints.
“Preservation conditions were right for footprints but not so great for bones,” Persons said. However, scientists are certain that the footprints belong to a raptor because each one contains the imprint of only two toes, which corresponds to the foot anatomy of raptors. Raptors generally have three toes, but they keep one off the ground to preserve the big claw at the tip from wear and tear.
People believe Fujianipus demonstrates that raptors had the ability to grow much larger and compete with the largest predatory dinosaurs on the landscape at the time – allosauroids, some of which exceeded 10 metres or more in length.
According to Persons, raptors had an advantage over allosauroids in terms of speed. However, without fossilized leg bones, the researchers cannot correctly measure Fujianipus’ speed.
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